Maestra Marin Alsop takes us to Mission San Juan Bautista for a Grand Finale program lush with texture and rich with emotion. Avner Dorman's “nightcap,” Reflections, opens the program. Taiwanese composer Chiayu returns for the World Premiere of a concerto titled Xuan Zang, a Festival commission written for and featuring soloist Kristin Jurkscheit, principal horn of the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra. The most famous of Chinese monks, Xuan Zang lived during the Tang dynasty, and in this one-movement work the solo French horn represents the heroic figure on his nineteen year journey across the culturally diverse regions of Asia. Guggenheim Fellow Dan Welcher joins us for the first time for the West Coast Premiere of Bright Wings: A Valediction. Bright Wings was written as a farewell to someone who’d recently died, yet the Dallas Morning News writes, “there is nothing mournful in any sense in the music. Indeed, it seems, on the whole, downright celebratory, and perhaps it was meant as a paean for living.” The composer describes it as “a bold, full-voiced piece, lit from within with energy.”
British composer Anna Clyne’s Within Her Arms for string ensemble refers to the words of Vietnamese Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh and was lauded by the Los Angeles Times for its “luminous textures.” Alex Ross in The New Yorker described it as “a fragile elegy… intertwining voices of lament that bring to mind English Renaissance masterpieces of Thomas Tallis and John Dowland.” It is music written with love in remembrance of the composer’s mother. Pierre Jalbert’s composition, Fire and Ice, is a work of contrasts. The San Francisco Chronicle writes “ ‘Ice’ proceeds in large, slow-moving slabs of sound—the model here seems to be one of Shostakovich's rhetorically weighty slow movements—with eerie string harmonics and bowed percussion to add a frozen gloss; ‘Fire’ is a fierce, bouncy orchestral explosion."
A post-concert reception for the musicians and audience members follows the evening performance at Jardines de San Juan Restaurant.
This concert will be delay broadcast and webstreamed on KUSP radio Friday, August 26 at 7pm. . Program Notes may be read below.
Program Notes
Within Her Arms for String Orchestra(2009)
Anna Clyne (b. 1980)
Anna Clyne is a composer of acoustic and electro-acoustic music; part of her artistic statement reads, “Inspired by visual images and physical movement, my intention is to create music that complements and interacts with other art-forms, and that impacts performers and audiences alike,”
Born in London, Great Britain, Clyne received a Bachelor of Music degree from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, and a Masters degree from the Manhattan School of Music. Recent commissions include works for Carnegie Hall and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Last fall she began a two-year residency with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. She made her Festival debut last season with the West Coast Premiere of rewind.
Within Her Arms was a 2009 commission from Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen as part of the Los Angeles Philharmonic's Green Umbrella series. Salonen conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic strings in the premiere on April 7, 2009 at Walt Disney Hall. Alex Ross of The New Yorker described it as “a fragile elegy intertwining voices of lament that bring to mind English Renaissance masterpieces of Thomas Tallis and John Dowland.” The composer writes:
Within Her Arms is music for my mother, with all my love.
Earth will keep you tight within her arms dear one So that tomorrow you will be transformed into flowers. This flower smiling quietly in this morning field, This morning you will weep no more, dear one, For we have gone through too deep a night. This morning, yes, this morning, I kneel down on the green grass And I notice your presence. Flowers, that speak to me in silence The message of love and understanding Has indeed come.
Xuan Zang: Concerto for Horn and Orchestra (2010) - World Premiere Chiayu (b. 1975)
Taiwan-born composer Chiayu’s association with the Cabrillo Festival stems from her attendance at the Cabrillo Festival Composers Workshop during the summer of 2006, which she describes as “a wonderful experience.” It also saw the world premiere of her orchestra piece Hard Roads in Shu, which went on to receive performances by the Detroit, San Francisco and Toledo Symphony Orchestras. Her piece Feng Nian Ji , a Festival commission, received its world premiere at the 2008 Festival, which also saw a performance of her oboe and string quartet piece Moods. She returns this season with the world premiere of her Horn Concerto, commissioned by the Festival and dedicated to Maestra Marin Alsop. She writes:
This one-movement work is based on the journey of the most famous Chinese monk, Xuan Zang, in the Tang dynasty (618-907 A.D.). In my piece, the solo horn represents the heroic figure, Xuan Zang, who received the essence of Buddhism after traveling to India; he studied there for several years and then returned to China, where he translated sutras into Chinese.
The formal structure of my piece loosely follows Xuan Zang’s journey, which spanned nineteen years, covered 12,000 kilometers, and took him to 108 countries; however, only selected scenes and impressions are depicted in my piece, such as traveling through deserts, mountains and rivers. Xuan Zang walked through the various culturally distinct regions of Asia. The way Xuan Zang encountered these different cultures during his trip corresponds with my recent interest regarding the incorporation of diverse cultural elements in my composition, as I am experiencing my own international, intercultural journey today.
I integrated the folk song of Uyghur people in the Xinjiang province with my own musical elements and developing technique. This piece explores the varied characteristics and timbre of the French horn and of the contrasting instrumental groups within the orchestra. The sound of the horn reminds me of the breadth and expansiveness of nature—a quality that in Chinese we describe by the phrase Rao liang san ri, bu jue yu er, “the music circles for three days, and does not stop in your ears.”
Bright Wings: A Valediction (1996) - West Coast Premiere Dan Welcher (b. 1948)
Making his Cabrillo Festival debut this year, Dan Welcher was educated at the Eastman School of Music and the Manhattan School of Music, specializing in piano and bassoon. He served as principal bassoon of the Louisville Symphony Orchestra from 1972-78 and taught for fourteen years at the Aspen Music Festival in Colorado. A faculty member of the University of Texas at Austin since 1978, his commissions include works for the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, the Handel and Haydn Society of Boston, the Utah Symphony Orchestra and the Las Vegas Philharmonic, among others.
Bright Wings was commissioned by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and its Music Director Andrew Litton, and composed between November 1995 and September 1996. It received its premiere in March 1997. The composer writes:
Bright Wings is my fifteenth work for orchestra. In contrast to the majority of my mature symphonic pieces, it was written without a narrative program and with no extramusical “story line.” The title comes from a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins called "God's Grandeur," but I hasten to add that the music is not based on the poem in any way—I simply liked the final six lines of the poem, which seemed to highlight the spirit of this music:
And, for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; And though the last lights off the black West went Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward springs— Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
I was especially drawn to lines such as “the dearest freshness deep down things,” which sounds particularly British to me (and refers, in the poem, to the fact that the soul of Nature is inexhaustible, despite what Man does to her). The image of the predictable (but always surprising) sunrise as evidence of a protective, caring deity also moves me, particularly with its metaphor of a nurturing mother bird.
But the impetus to write Bright Wings was an internal one. 1995-96 was a time of personal loss for me; a season of deaths and farewells. I wanted to write a "Valediction" for one departed person in particular, but at the same time I wanted to write a piece that was bold, full-voiced, and lit from within with energy. As in Hopkins' poem (which I did not know until this piece was nearly finished), my music attempts to reassure, to look eastward through the losses for the new sun, and to receive a kind of Grace: not with hushed wonder, but with the life force in full stride.
The piece is cast in a single movement, divided into five connected sections. It starts with an introductory passage that gradually accelerates from the moderate hammer-blows of the unison D that opens it, to a raucously pounding fanfare for the full orchestra. This yields to a lengthy passage of nearly static, slow-evolving chords in the muted horns, with very high violins forming cirrus clouds of melody above them. A transition leads to a rhythmic, repeated motive in the strings, which ultimately supports a rather stately theme in the solo clarinet. This theme is developed three times, with interruptions between the repetitions. The third presentation of the theme reveals it as a full-throated chorale, with the entire brass section sailing on the rugged, repeating mantra of the strings. At length, this subsides, leaving a solo clarinet to comment on it. The clarinet creates a fabric, gradually incorporating other woodwinds, with a texture of many transparent layers. A solo piccolo gently intones above this tapestry in a kind of blessing. The orchestra rallies, and the chorale statement heard earlier returns, slower and farther away, while the rest of the orchestra trudges on, gaining momentum. One final push, and we're back to the opening fanfare music—but not for long. A unison rush downwards returns us to the key of the opening, and the hammer-blows on the note D are with us again. Unlike the opening, this time the music gradually gets slower and slower, until it feels as though it will break of its own weight. One last rally pushes the tempo forward, and Bright Wings ends on an upsweep of energy.
Pierre Jalbert was born in Manchester, New Hampshire into a family originally from Quebec, and grew up in northern Vermont. He did his undergraduate work at the Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio and received a Ph.D. in Composition at the University of Pennsylvania studying with composer George Crumb. He has served as Composer-in-Residence with the California Symphony Orchestra and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra.
Jalbert made his Cabrillo Festival debut last season with his piece In Aeternam. Fire and Ice was commissioned by Kathryn Gould through the Meet the Composer’s Magnum Opus Project, and was first performed on February 23, 2007 by the Oakland East Bay Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Music Director Michael Morgan. Jalbert writes:
Though this work has little to do with the end of all things as suggested in the poem of Robert Frost, it does have to do with the idea of contrasts. The work contains two movements of contrasting character. The first movement, Ice, is slow, lyrical, and ethereal, making use of the high strings and the bowing of various percussion instruments. The second movement, Fire, is a high-energy study in orchestral virtuosity.
The first movement opens with a bell-like gesture, accompanied by pizzicato strings, which comes back numerous times in different guises. The music that follows builds and recedes many times, but ultimately ends in quiet reflection. The atmospheric, “icy” sounds are produced by the bowing of the vibraphone and crotales in the percussion section, along with high string harmonics.
The second movement, marked Presto con fuoco, literally “with fire”, propels forward in constant motion. Towards the beginning, a solo woodwind theme is played first by a lone clarinet then all the upper woodwinds in close canon. This serves as a kind of refrain throughout the movement and is heard numerous times. Again, the percussion section is very important and towards the end there is an extended passage for the percussion alone, all playing various kinds of drums.
